Customer Reviews

Seagate STM302003EHAB01-RK 3.5-Inch USB2.0 200GB External Hard Drive

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I bought my Maxtor a year and 2 months ago. The warranty is good for one year.
That means that if the Maxtor fails within one year, they will send you a new one, but tough luck on recovering your data. You can protect your investment by buying a new one every year and then trying to figure out how to transfer the data from the old to the new. What a Godsend.
Maxtor promised regular and virtually hands free backups of my hard drive. It was simple to install and set up. After installing I checked it regularly for months and it appeared to work as advertised. After not checking it in months, I discovered it wasn't working but it gave me a diagnostic code.
When I called Maxtor the service was poor. After several efforts to get through, getting switched around, and hanging up on me, they told me that the diagnostic code means that the Maxtor is dead. (Why couldn't they just skip this diagnostic code run around.)
If there is data on the Maxtor that I want, they can try to recover it but it will be very expensive. They wouldn't say how much.
Who knows when this thing failed but if I have to check it daily to make sure it is still working, what good is it? And I really don't know if it would have provided a back up if my hard drive crashed. You have to take it all on faith until disaster hits and then you may find out the system doesn't really work anyway. I would not buy another.

I've owned this device for two weeks now. The USB 2.0 transfer speed is nothing compared to SATA or SATA II, but to pay a bill for 200GB of storage (which is equal to approximately 190GB if you're computer savvy) and have a small enclosure is great.

So far, I haven't experienced any problems with the drive being recognized on Windows XP Pro SP2 or Windows Media Center Edition. On Server 2003, it loaded but I had to add it as a drive manually using the disk manager utility. Works great if you need a backup drive and plan on doing when not in peak useage.

The drive is very quiet and I haven't experienced any reliability problems to this point. I would have rather had an external SATA drive, but for the price I paid and what it gives I truly don't believe you can beat this deal.

Highly recommended.

I've had this item for only 5 months and all of a sudden it stopped working. I sent it for repairs and first you have to pay $50 for the company to just look at it and diagnose the problem. Next, they tell you you will have to pay between $300 to $5000 to recover your data if it works. The nice thing about this whole ordeal was they would only charge you if the recovery is successful. I lost a lot of my pictures and videos that I cant recover again. I am very disappointed and will never buy from this company again. So, I'm out the $127.99 that I paid for the hard drive, $50 for the diagnostic check, the shipping charges to send to them and to return back to me and alot of my memories....Dont waste your money!!!

Great product for a great price. So easy to us too... just connect to computer and turn it on - its a drag and drop type of deal.

Sadly I had the same problem with my drive, after about a year it suddenly isnt recognized under XP anymore, and Vista only sees a empty uninitialized drive. All data gone.

The best thing is, I opened the case to extract the hard drive and connect it directly to the motherboard as the built in USB controller does not allow any recovery software to access the drive directly, and the hard drive is encrypted with a key that only the USB controller knows !

BUY THIS HARD DRIVE, if you want to waste $100. I bought a 500 GB hard drive from Maxtor 1 year ago for about $100 that looked exactly like this one. It stopped working after 7 or 8 months. I lost 484 GB of pictures, games, movies, books, and documentary videos (my 400 GB BBC and Discovery video collection!). My friend also bought the exact 500 GB hard drive to store his Japanese animations, and it also stopped working under a year. If you want to lose a $100, BUY THIS HARD DRIVE.

Like other reviews you'll read here, DON'T BUY THIS DRIVE. The cheap plastic shell should have been a give-away, but this thing is cheap and not to be trusted with any important info. I had mine about 6 months, and it quit working. Not worth the chunk of change they want to recover my info. Spend the money on a better, more robust system.

This external stays cool, and I can't hear a thing. I run it almost all day long. I have had it for over a month with out any problems.

The distributor of Maxtor was completely professional. This external hard drive arrived two days early and in perfect shape.